Openness, value, and scholarly societies

Use the link to access the full text article.  An excerpt reads as follows: "In 2011, the Modern Language Association (MLA) established a new office of scholarly communication and began a series of experiments in ways of supporting the open exchange of scholarly work among its members. While the office and its platforms are new, the motivating force behind the office is not. From the beginning, scholarly societies were designed to play a crucial role in facilitating communication between scholars working on common subjects. The Royal Society of London, for instance, was founded in the mid-17th century as a means of helping the 'invisible college' of natural philosophers attain visibility; the society met weekly to discuss experiments and their results, and its members worked together to extend knowledge of the natural world.1 These face-to-face meetings were supplemented by an active correspondence among the members; their mode of communication gradually shifted from letters sent between individual members to correspondence gathered, reproduced, and distributed by the society. The society thus became a formal structure whose goal was to improve the circulation of the research of its members, furthering the knowledge that they produced and advancing their common work. Such has been true for every learned society founded since that time. Facilitating scholarly communication, in other words, is exactly what societies such as these were founded to do...  Today, however, many scholarly societies, like many academic institutions, are facing challenging times. Maintaining a membership in one’s disciplinary organization was once thought of as a core component of what it was to be a professional, but the changing funding environment, the increasing casualization of the academic workforce, and the ease of creating direct ties among individual colleagues in online social networking systems have contributed to the tenuous relationships that many scholars feel to their organizations today. Scholarly societies thus face rising costs and declining memberships, causing them to rely increasingly on income from publications—at precisely the moment that they face increasing expectations among scholars that information and communication will exist in open spaces online. Increasing calls for open access to scholarship are posing serious challenges to the financial models that have allowed scholarly societies to fund the nonrevenue generating projects that they have established on behalf of their members.  Together, these twin pressures—the need to enhance the ties between scholars and their organizations while simultaneously doing more with less —begin to suggest that the traditional value proposition of the scholarly society, in which one becomes a member in order to receive the various communications of the society, is no longer as viable as it once was. But there isn’t a clear sense, as yet, of where the society’s value for its members today, not to mention its sources of revenue that allow it to fulfill its mission, might lie. In order to find a way forward, today’s scholarly societies must begin to think differently about their functions, their structures, and their overall goals..."